Rafe and Robin in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
Rafe and Robin waltz into Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of D. Faustus in scene four and vanish three scenes later. Although they may appear trivial and even intrusive, Rafe and Robin bring much-needed comic relief to this tragic play. Imitating Doctor Faustus’ actions unwittingly, this pair of ostlers illuminates Faustus’ misuse of power. They also reflect Faustus’ character by acting as his parallel self. Behind their clownish antics, Rafe and Robin highlight Faustus’ downfall and evil’s power through comic relief, parody, and parallel.
According to the Neo-Classical view of tragedies, tragic action is the essence of the play; comic relief is often dismissed as mere filler (Tydeman and Thomas 48). To overturn this view, Rafe and Robin successfully render evil harmless with their lowly jests while Doctor Faustus cannot free himself from evil’s bondage with his great learning. When Mephastophilis transforms the two clowns into an ape and a dog in sc.viii, Robin and Rafe only laugh. This nonchalance dampens the severity of the curses. In sc.iv, when Wagner threatens to turn him into a flea, Robin immediately thinks of a flea’s ability to crawl all over the bodies of women. As Cole remarks, “In the long-range divine scheme of things, evil is essentially both impotent and vulnerable; hence the possibility of looking at it as a laughable degradation”(15). By laughing at evil, Robin and Rafe provide moments of relief in a play overflowing with reminders of damnation. Aside from unpolished laughter, puns also provide comic relief. In sc.iv, when Wagner attempts to enslave Robin, the clown plays on the words “guilders” and “gridirons”; thus, Robin m...
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...en a great thinker such as Faustus is pervious to the lures of evil. By acting as a parallel to Faustus, Rafe and Robin further highlight the tragic downfall of Doctor Faustus. Though their appearances in The Tragical History of D. Faustus are brief and their actions seem to be of no consequence, Rafe and Robin bring both comic relief and serious reflection to this tragic Marlovian play.
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3 Dec. 2013. Kerschen, Lios. A. A “Critical Essay on ‘Romeo and Juliet’. ” Drama for Students. Ed.
Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's first authentic tragedy. It is about two lovers who commit suicide when their feuding families prevent them from being together. The play has many characters, each with its own role in keeping the plot line. Some characters have very little to do with the plot; but some have the plot revolving around them. While the character of Friar Lawrence spends only a little time on stage, he is crucial to the development of the conclusion of the play. It is Friar Laurence’s good intentions, his willingness to take risks and his shortsightedness that lead to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.
At the early stages of slavery, both the south and the north embraced slavery but differences in resource endowments, needs and interests lead to varying view of slavery. The north developed a modern money economy that required little inputs from slaves thus the economic importance of slavery diminished. Eventually, slavery was abolished. On the other hand, the southern states were reaping huge returns from agriculture (a labor intensive industry) therefore slavery was critical to the economic well-being. Slavery was only outlawed in the southern states after the civil war after the confederates (southern states), who wanted to secede from the federal republic, were defeated by the union (north states).
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“To put matters simply, it [the plague] did not spare those of any age or fortune,” (15). With this account, Nicephorus Gregoras, in my opinion, impeccably sums up The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A large percentage of the contributors to John Aberth’s book of documents acknowledge that the plague did not discriminate against any person or group of persons. For this reason, I consider the overall sense of what the plague meant to the people of the mid 1300s to be a looming understanding that the plague could not be avoided, no matter how wealthy, powerful, or religious a person claimed to be.
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In “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare, two very young people fall in love but cannot be with each other because of the feud in between their families. The feud ends when Romeo and Juliet both kill themselves because of heartbreak over the other. The minor characters Mercutio, Tybalt, and Friar Lawrence serve as foils to Romeo, to help support the theme of patience.
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In the tremendous play of ‘Romeo & Juliet’, Shakespeare’s ways engages the audience straight away. The astounding methods he uses hooks the audience into the play and allows them to read on, wondering what will happen. The tragic love story of Romeo & Juliet, as mentioned in the prologue, sets a variety of themes throughout Act 1 Scene 5. Many of the recognisable themes are: youth and age, revenge, forbidden love, fate, action and hate. The main idea of the play is a feud that had been going on between two families, The ‘Montagues and Capulets’, the son of the Montagues and the daughter of the Capulets fall in love and the story tells us how tragic, death, happiness and revenge find them throughout the play.
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Marlowe reflects ambition in the character of Faustus to deter the audience from being ambitious, and over-reaching their place in the ‘Chain of Being’. However, if Marlowe chose to be ‘dangerously over-ambitious’ and regarded himself as this, it is likely that he may have written ‘Dr. Faustus’ differently, not viewing ambition in such a negative way. Whatever Marlowe’s view on ambition was, it is not made clear in the play, through Faustus or other characters. Certain aspects of his personality are indeed reflected in Faustus, which make reading the play and exploring Faustus as a character even more intriguing.
Snow, Edward A. "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire." Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.